The real AI race may no longer be at the frontier

Chinese open-weight models accounted for 41% of Hugging Face downloads this spring, surpassing US models, and the top six models on OpenRouter are all open models from Chinese firms including Tencent, Xiaomi, DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Z.ai. Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 trails in seventh, and Vercel data shows open models handled nearly a third of AI requests in June as the volume-heavy layer beneath premium closed models. The surge raises a pointed question: how much do frontier models still matter if most production AI runs on cheaper, customizable alternatives? Some argue closed frontier models may end up reserved for only the most specialized use cases.

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